A bright meteor briefly outshined the lights of New York City Friday evening (March 22), according to reports by witnesses who used Twitter and the Internet to report sightings of the fireball streaking over a broad stretch of the U.S. East Coast.

"Strange Friday night a meteor passed over my house tonight!" wrote one New Yorker writing as Yanksmom19.

The first fireball sightings came at about 8 p.m. EDT (0000 March 23 GMT) and sparked more than 500 witness reports to the American Meteor Society. Reports of the meteor flooded Twitter from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.

"The witnesses range from along the Atlantic Coast ranging from Maine to North Carolina," Robert Lunsford, the society's fireball coordinator, wrote in an update. "This object was also seen as far inland as Ohio."

They say it happens more frequently than we know, and that it is only getting noticed more due to the one that hit over Russia. But I think if that were true, we’d still have people taking photos of these things and posting them up.

Even I’ve been seeing shooting stars, and I’ve never seen them before. And not because I’m looking for them now, either. This meteor is more impressive than what I saw, of course.

Makes me wonder if some collision somewhere in space sent a bunch of chunks of large rocks our way.

This one does look and sound particularly dramatic in appearance. This report described it as, “A meteor that looked like an immense ball of fire streaked across the sky up and down the East Coast Friday night, astounding viewers throughout Massachusetts and beyond with its tantalizing tail of colored flames.”

Well thats just great! Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis? This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back. If we die—well—thats what happens anyway.

4
posted on 03/22/2013 11:19:35 PM PDT
by jonrick46
(The opium of Communists: other people's money.)

Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

"Makes me wonder if some collision somewhere in space sent a bunch of chunks of large rocks our way"

That idea is just ridiculous, by the way. No disparagement intended because not everyone is an astronomer. But the earth along with everything else is orbiting the sun at great speed. There is no "our way". The only thing that could cause an increased incident of meteors is if somehow there is more debris everywhere, not just here. I see meteors every time I go out to look at the stars. Sometimes I see an unusually large ones.

19
posted on 03/23/2013 12:14:16 AM PDT
by Telepathic Intruder
(The only thing the Left has learned from the failures of socialism is not to call it that)

So what you are essentially saying is that asteroids we can’t see and don’t know are there, cannot collide and fragment in a path our orbit takes us?

Wow. Thank God. For a moment there I thought that might be a problem. But since it’s not and we know all trajectories and locations of every solid chunk of matter in the universe, I’ll go back to bed now.

You know what it could be? Past-life experience intruding on present time. Every ancient religion has its own myth about the end of the world. We could be on the verge of a four fold crossrept. A P.K.E. surge of incredible even dangerous proportions.

Wow. I got to get some sleep, I'm dying.

Wait a minute.

I've worked up an appetite!

I'm getting a midnight snack.

Pass the salt!

21
posted on 03/23/2013 12:28:13 AM PDT
by jonrick46
(The opium of Communists: other people's money.)

JOURNALIST: No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.

No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.

At midnight on the twelfth of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Mars and sped towards Earth. Across two hundred million miles of void, invisibly hurtling towards us, came the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth. As I watched, there was another jet of gas. It was another missile, starting on its way. And that's how it was for the next ten nights. A flare, spurting out from Mars - bright green, drawing a green mist behind it - a beautiful, but somehow disturbing sight. Ogilvy, the astronomer, assured me we were in no danger. He was convinced there could be no living thing on that remote, forbidding planet.

"The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one," he said. "The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one - but still they come!"

JOURNALIST: Then came the night the first missile approached Earth. It was thought to be an ordinary falling star, but next day there was a huge crater in the middle of the Common, and Ogilvy came to examine what lay there: a cylinder, thirty yards across, glowing hot... and with faint sounds of movement coming from within. Suddenly the top began moving, rotating, unscrewing, and Ogilvy feared there was a man inside, trying to escape. he rushed to the cylinder, but the intense heat stopped him before he could burn himself on the metal.

"The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one," he said. "The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one - but they still come!"

"Yes, the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one," he said. "The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one - but they still come!"

It seems totally incredible to me now that everyone spent that evening as though it were just like any other. From the railway station came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. It all seemed so safe and tranquil...

At 22,000+ miles out they are so far and so fast that they will never come back. By comparison the space station is only 263 miles up. It experiences tiny atmospheric drag and must be occasionally boosted or it will eventually fall. The GS sats carry an amount of reserve fuel so when they get old they can be boosted out even further, out of the way, to a trash orbit. It would take a hugh amount of fuel to slow them down enough to fall back to earth, seriesly ;-).

“The only thing that could cause an increased incident of meteors is if somehow there is more debris everywhere, not just here.”

No, that is quite wrong. Increased incidence of meteors colliding with the Earth do occur periodically and occasionally. Periodic meteor showers occur on a periodic and often well known schedule as the result of the rocky debris in the orbital pat of a current or past comet intersects with the Earth on its own orbital path. Occasionally the debris from the collision of asteroids or meteors, usually in the outer Solar Systems such as the asteroid belt, Jovian planets, or the Oort Cloud sends debris on a new orbital path into the inner Solar System. When the orbital path of the Earth and the debris happen to intesect at the same time, we can see an increased number of meteors. Some increased frequency of encounters with meteors and asteroids is random.

Some people are wondering if Frisay’s meteor is related to the lare meteor over Russia recently? The answer is definitely a no. Thier directions of fall were very different and indicate thay came from totally different regions of space. Their appearance in Earth’s skies so close together in time are simply random happenstance. If the two meteors had come from the same direction and region of space, then they could have possibly been related in origin. In this case, however, they are definitely not related in origin in space.

My wife and I saw it over the Mass Pike last night about 8:00 or so. At first I thought it was a military jet in trouble it was moving so fast. Then it began to break up an it was clearly a meteor. It was amazing

36
posted on 03/23/2013 4:32:41 AM PDT
by muir_redwoods
(Don't fire until you see the blue of their helmets)

I have been suspecting that what the Earth has been seeing for a while is like an ancient collision that did the equivalent of sending a shotgun blast of objects in our general direction.

An interesting point about such collisions is that while the Moon is about 27% the size of the Earth, this does not count Earth’s atmosphere. With the atmosphere, the Earth is a substantially larger target for space objects, larger by say a 50 to 100 miles thick atmosphere.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.